Tales of Sin & Fury, Part 1 Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘I think he’d be the Ace of Spades.’
    That gaunt figure in the black velvet jacket. I can see him brooding in that old armchair in the cottage. I can see him striding through the Dorset countryside, his frozen wrath casting a shadow over the hills. Refusing to speak to me, his face set like a corpse. It was like talking to the dead.
    I take a deep breath. Might as well tell the whole story. ‘But behind him in the pack there was an older rejection.’
    â€˜Another bloke?’ asks Debs.
    â€˜Worse,’ I say. ‘A rejection going right back. To when I was little. Nestling behind him was the Queen of Diamonds. She glittered. She dazzled. She still does. But she never wanted to be my mother.’
    She never wanted me born. She’d rather be without the stretch marks.
    â€˜Queen of Diamonds?’ says Debs. ‘What’ya talking about? Always looking over her shoulder?’ She grimaced sideways like a playing card.
    I shake my head. ‘The Queen of Diamonds doesn’t look back. Nor did my mother.’
    I held my breath going into her room when I was little. She faced away from me, sat at her dressing table. She never turned round. She waited ’till I appeared in her mirror. Then from under those perfectly plucked eyebrows she would flick a glance at me. While she carried on with her creams and tubes and powders and lipstick. I looked at her face in the mirror and saw myself hovering at the edge of her reflection. She had eyes only for herself.
    â€˜She found me an embarrassment,’ I say. ‘She liked to make money, mix with glamorous people. I can still hear her. “You’re a dreamer,” she used to say, “Shape up, smarten up,” “You’ll never make anything of your life,” “You’ll never be a success like me.” I felt a failure since the beginning. All he did was draw blood from an old wound.’
    â€˜Rejection, that’s a fact of life, babe,’ says Mandy. ‘It goes with the territory. Like it or suck it.’
    â€˜Wish I could have,’ I say. ‘But all I did was carry it with me. Looking back, I guess it was really all about her. When I got to Greece I hoped the sky like an oven could scorch all that pain out of my life. She didn’t even know I’d left England.
    â€˜When they switched off the boat engines I picked up the hamper that held all my worldly possessions. I watched the American pack his notebook into his rucksack and managed to lose him in the crowd as we got off the boat. I felt a clean, healthy tiredness. I went to rent an upstairs room from a smiling Greek lady in one of the whitewashed houses close to the harbour. I had books. I had earned a little money teaching English in Athens. I would eat frugally. I would be alone. I would start again.
    â€˜My room wasn’t large. Outside I could see the clear skies of a Greek spring, but inside it was cold. No direct sunshine through the small window in the thick white wall. I had a wooden table that wobbled and an upright chair with a woven rafia seat. I sat and read. I walked to the baker’s for lunch. Down to the taverna for a meal in the evening. The locals stared at me as if I was an unknown species. Then back to my room.
    â€˜Nothing in it quite worked. The door wouldn’t shut, the windows wouldn’t open, and the shutter was wedged, it wouldn’t either open or shut. A couple of little handmade cotton rugs on the floor, but the cold of the stone came up through my feet all the same. I was alone. But I was lonely too. You can only do so much reading when the sun is shining outside.
    â€˜The first time I went to the beach I called in at the Poste Restante.’
    â€˜Talk English,’ says Debs.
    â€˜It’s at the post office,’ I say, ‘where they keep letters for people who don’t have an address. There was a letter there waiting for me, I could tell from the writing it was from my